IT IS two years since David Cameron first used the slogan “aspiration nation” to describe the Britain he claims to be creating.

Getting the keys to your house was a sign you were on the way up [GETTY]

As the Government’s receipts on stamp duty pass £5billion a year it is a claim that is beginning to sound hollow.

It would be hard to conceive of a more punitive tax on aspiration than stamp duty.

For most of the past century the moment you take the keys to your first home has been a sign that you are going somewhere in life. Home ownership is all about responsibility, self- reliance and building up a base of solid wealth that hopefully will allow you to go through life without having to call on state help. No wonder that successive Tory governments – and later even Labour ones – were keen to encourage home-ownership.

But it has all come to a juddering halt. Instead of encouraging home buyers as responsible citizens Chancellor George Osborne seems to be intent on treating them as if they were engaging in an antisocial act. If you move home regularly, as millions of Britons have to as they work their way up the career ladder, you can easily find yourself paying more in tax than you would if you were a 60-a-day smoker.

Recently I worked out how much a friend of mine, a doctor, has paid in stamp duty over the past 12 years, a period in which he has moved home three times. It came out at a whopping £63,880. Then I calculated how much tax he would have paid had he smoked three packets of cigarettes a day during that time. That came to £59,946.

Fortunes have been made in the property market over the past decade and a half. Anyone like me lucky enough to have been in a position to buy a house in the 1990s can hardly complain about the one per cent stamp duty we then had to pay – the bill has long since been dwarfed by the profits we have made on our homes.

But the burden of stamp duty doesn’t fall upon people who have made large profits on their houses. It falls upon people who are buying now, at hugely inflated prices and who have made huge sacrifices to save up a deposit. The last thing they need is to be landed with a tax bill for £20,000, which is what you will pay if you spend £500,000 – the price of a one bedroom flat in Central London and a modest family home in the South-east.

George Osbourne has overlooked cutting stamp duty which would help hard-pressed home buyers [GETTY]

What is so damaging about stamp duty is that the thresholds have never been raised

What is so damaging about stamp duty is that the thresholds have never been raised. When Gordon Brown introduced a rate of three per cent on properties worth more than £250,000 in 2000 only luxury homes fell into that category. Yet stamp duty went on to become the stealthiest of all of Brown’s stealth taxes.

He never increased that threshold and disgracefully neither has Osborne, in spite of huge property price inflation in the past 14 years. As a result buyers are now paying three per cent stamp duty on studio flats in London and two-bedroom houses in many other areas.

Worse, unlike income tax stamp duty is constructed in such a way that even if you pay a single penny more than £250,000 for a home you have to pay three per cent tax on the whole sum. It leads to the absurd situation where you could be offered a pay rise of £5,000 to take up a new job in another town – and then find yourself whacked with a £7,500 tax bill to move home.

It is hardly much of an incentive to move around the country looking for better work – something that the Chancellor should surely be trying to encourage in order to generate much-needed economic growth.

When Osborne cut the top rate of income tax from 50 pence to 45 pence he correctly predicted that the measure would generate increased tax revenues. Higher taxes discourage people from taking on extra work and encourage tax avoidance while cutting taxes reverses that process. Tax revenues increased too when former chancellor Nigel Lawson cut the top rate of income tax to 40 pence in 1988.

Yet on stamp duty Osborne seems blind to the likelihood that if he lowered the rate of tax he might end up with more revenue. If you set stamp duty so high it dissuades someone from moving home it means you are not going to raise a penny in revenue from them.

Ten years ago residential property transactions were running at 150,000 a year. Now even in spite of the improvement in the property market they are down to 100,000 a year. Stamp duty isn’t the only factor but it is certainly part of it.

The Tories still claim to be the party of home ownership but a decade ago 70 per cent of people in England and Wales lived in owner-occupied homes.

That is now down to 64 per cent and falling. The Government has sought to help first-time buyers through the Help-to-Buy scheme, which uses taxpayers’ money to underwrite mortgages of people buying homes up to £600,000. As economists have pointed out, while it has helped a few to buy houses in the short term that comes at the price of stoking house price inflation, making it even harder for the next generation.

And yet George Osborne has overlooked another measure which would help hard-pressed home buyers and very likely increase tax revenues: cutting stamp duty. If the Tories want to be the party of aspiration it is high time the Chancellor took action.